Oprah Winfrey's OWN network has been sued by a former employee who claims she is the victim of sex and pregnancy discrimination. In a lawsuit filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Carolyn Hommel claims she was hired in 2010 as senior director of scheduling and acquisitions at the network, co-owned by Discovery Communications. But despite receiving a favorable performance review and being told she was on-track to become a vice president, she was replaced by a temporary employee when she was forced to take a medical leave during her pregnancy. Hommel says her duties were gradually taken away from her and given to the temporary employee, and she was later excluded from numerous meetings when she returned to the office.,,,, Read the full article at Hollywood Reporter

Yahoo: In the year of the "go viral or go home" Super Bowl commercial, Coca-Cola is now embroiled in the latest advertising controversy for going too far on-air and online with an offensive spot in the desert. The soda giant's cowboys vs. showgirls vs. badlanders "choose your own adventure" style ad is being condemned by Arab-American groups for what they call a "racist" depiction of Arabs, Sue Zeidler of Reuters reports. The spot, which you can watch for yourself (above), begins with an image of camels being ridden through a desert...

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

CBS : Cats kill billions of birds every year and even more tiny rodents and other mammals in the United States, a new study finds.
According to the research, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, cats kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds and between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion small mammals, such as meadow voles and chipmunks.
Though it's hard to know exactly how many birds live in the United States, the staggering number of bird deaths may account for as much as 15 percent of the total bird population, said study co-author Pete Marra, an animal ecologist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute........